Chewing the Cud

Alert to non-geek readers: This post probably will not contain too much information that you will find interesting. You may want to check out the new Strongbad email instead. I have to say, I am loving lesscode. The posts there are quite perceptive and intruiging. One of the more recent posts talks about the evolution of Java, and how it is actually seeming to de-evolve from its original intentions. Knowing a couple developers who advocate Java as the end-all be-all language, I wonder how they would react to this post. The author seems to have a fairly knowledgable background:

My background: five years in scientific research (started in 1985 on complex systems modeling), followed by 15 years of software development. I've been through it all — FORTRAN, Pascal, C, Smalltalk, C++, VB, Java, ERP, J2EE, EAI, SOA, .NET, and finally (thankfully:-) Ruby and Rails.

It's an exciting time to be sure… UPDATE - Looking through the poster's (Alex) personal website, I am finding this guy to be very interesting. A little obsessive and perhaps overly analytical, but he certainly suggests some interesting ideas. In particular, and Gabe should agree with Alex here, is Alex's post on validation.

Sculpture…a very cool art form that has to be precise or else the composition just won't work. Seriously though, most sculpture is amatuer compared to this. Michaelangelo was weak sauce using a big chunk of rock…this takes skillz.

<geek> Not that anyone would pick up on this, and while most of the three people that read this already know what has occurred, I still feel I should mention that I have transferred my domain and moved my site to a new server. GoDaddy is handling my domain while Gabriel is allowing me to put my content on his server. So the last couple posts did happen when the timestamp says; the domain transfer just hadn't happened in time for you to see them right away. </geek>

I finally did it…I joined Flikr. Here's my portion of the site. The pictures are in no particular order; actually, they are in the order in which I uploaded them, but that in and of itself is meaningless. Seriously though, Flikr rocks the house. Pretty sweet UI, very slick slideshow tool, and tons of users' pictures to browse through. Using the tags makes it very easy to find pictures relating to a theme. All around a great site…and it's free!

I have been playing with Flickr for the last hour, uploading some of my pictures, but mostly browsing others. I came across this one…hard to put into words what it makes me feel. Mostly that I miss my dad, the way I knew him before this past Christmas…I still love you, Dad

When it comes to color coordination, I am no Monet. I admit I am a guy when it comes to colors. I function with the basics - red, blue, green, purple, black, white, orange, etc… Honey Mustard yellow, spearmint green, charcoal black…these colors do not illict images containing the subtle variations in shade, hue, luminosity, and whatever other terms you can imagine to describe color. Perhaps saddest of all is that those colors listed previously all have real-world incarnations that I can directly reference – I just don't see the difference. The next problem that stems from lacking the ability (or caring to have the ability?) is that I have no idea which colors go with which. I remember complimentary colors from elementry arts and crafts which is great for 8 year olds, but when I am trying to design a website for a multinational corporation, knowing red and green go together will not encourage a healthy website look and feel. Fear not, my brethern who share this disposition! Help has arrived in the form of a nice, easy-to-use website that will automatically show you what colors go with what. You choose one color and it will generate five others that it thinks match! Very slick and useful, though the true test will be whether Gabe likes the generated colors. Artists! Sheesh, who cares about color, I just want to code!

There are times when I read the lesson that I stray from the marked text and read in between the citations or before or after a block, just to see what happens that the Lesson Committee didn't think pertinent. Sometimes addition inspiration comes; other times, a good chuckle and shaking of the head. This week we have an example of the latter, though it is more morbidly funny than actually hilarious. From the Section II, we read of the story of Elisha and Elijah where Elijah is taken up by the whirlwind. After Elisha parts the waters with Elijah's mantle, he goes back to Jericho, and sons of prophets acknowledge that the spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha. Great. Continuing on, however, we read about Elisha being taunted by little kids. Let's tune in and see how this man of God, whom the spirit of Elijah rests upon, handles it:

23 ¶ And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. 24 And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.

AHHHH!!! He took offense to being called bald, and as retribution cursed the children and caused two she bears to eat 42 of them (HHGttG anyone?). Like I said, morbidly funny. A different era to be sure…

I love checking the comments sellers leave for me in the feedback area of Ebay! What a great ego boost to see all the sellers there telling me what a great buyer I am. Hilarious…

A bit of nostalgia meets modern technology here - what would it take to play an 3 minute mp3 on an old school, card-reading computer? This site figures it out.

Assuming a non-Hollerith encoding with eight bits per column, and an MP3 file encoded at 128kbps CBR, there would be 36,864 cards in that deck, and the card reader would need a throughput of 205 cards per second. It might be wise to include an 8-column sequence number, however, so that a misordered deck can be repaired by a card sorter; with 72 data columns per card, the total is precisely 40,960 cards (40K cards), requiring a 228 card/second throughput." The 21 boxes of cards needed would by 5 feet 9 inches tall. That such a huge leap in technology is well within living memory astonishes Y.

The increases we've made…astounding.

We received some Cards tickets today from Gabriel. Freaking awesome seats too! Check it out here. Look for section 148, right behind home plate, and we are in row 9. Did I catch a niner in there? So pretty much this is going to rock! Live is the only way I'll watch baseball, and despite that I still find it fairly boring, so the fact that we're sitting extra close means I may actually enjoy the game! Here's hoping… UPDATE: It was fun, except for the Cards losing like bums. Definitely have to sit that close more often!